The National Geographic Magazine
Rosalia, trim communities set in the alter
nately wooded and farmed landscape below.
Coming into view shortly before we landed
at Spokane, the beautiful valley of the Spo
kane River stretched eastward toward Coeur
d'Alene. Towns named Opportunity and
Greenacres attest to its character.
From Spokane I drove 90 miles to Grand
Coulee Dam to obtain an on-the-ground im
pression of this American colossus.
My map had much to say of this area. It
told of the dam's upriver effect on the Colum
bia, now wide enough to merit a double blue
line and the name Franklin Delano Roose
velt Lake. It showed seven towns that were
born and grew with the building of Grand
Coulee Dam. Grand Coulee, ancient course
of the Columbia, and Dry Falls were other
items in my map's account of the region.*
I watched green water fall clear for 40 feet
from the dam's 1,650-foot spillway, then
break suddenly into a cottage-cheese texture
and whiteness for the final plunge of 300 feet.
I drove across its 4,173-foot crest, and listened
to the low, smooth hum of 1,260,000 electric
horsepower in one of its twin powerhouses.
I stood in its clinically clean control rooms
and walked through some of its eight-and-a
half miles of inspection tunnels.
Such comparisons as enough concrete to
build three great Pyramids, or to pave a
transcontinental highway, deal only with mag
nitude. The dam has other equally real but
less tangible qualities. An American standing
below the spillways of the Grand Coulee Dam
cannot help being proud of the Nation which
did this mighty job of engineering.
Nature Once Dammed the Columbia
Viewed from the air 24 hours later, man's
dam-building efforts shared their glory with
the natural setting where, during the Ice Age,
Nature threw a glacial dam across the Colum
bia. Thus diverted, the raging waters of the
swollen, glacier-fed river gouged out the 40
cubic-mile canyon that we saw stretching
southward from the dam site. This canyon
is Grand Coulee.
For some 25,000 years now, since the ice
receded and allowed the Columbia to revert
to its old, and present, channel, Grand Coulee
has been high and dry. Its floor is about
200 feet above the surface of Roosevelt Lake,
which was formed by Grand Coulee Dam.
The coulee is 52 miles long, one and a half
to five miles wide, and at places 1,000 feet
deep.
As our plane completed its circling ma
neuver and leveled off toward the southwest,
I could see earth-moving machines, which
appeared like ants on an anthill. They were
working on the second of two earth-fill dams
that will turn the northern half of Grand
Coulee into a high-level irrigation reservoir.
Pulling itself up by its electric bootstraps.
the Columbia will, in summer, raise some
seven percent of its volume through giant
pumps driven by electricity produced by other
waters of the Columbia as they pass through
the generators of Grand Coulee Dam.
Water from this equalizing reservoir, as it
is called, will be delivered by means of canals,
siphons, tunnels, and prehistoric watercourses
to more than 1,000,000 fertile but thirsty
acres to the south, some as far south as Pasco,
100 miles distant.
25,000-year-old Dry Falls
Our plane followed Grand Coulee far
enough to give us a look at Dry Falls-dry
for about 25,000 years.
I tried to visualize 100 Niagara Rivers
plunging over a three-mile brink for a sheer
drop of 400 feet-two and a half times the
drop of Niagara Falls. I couldn't do it. I
tried to from the air, and I tried it in the
hush of twilight as I stood beneath this ghost
of what may have been the mightiest cataract
of all time.
After brief stops at Wenatchee and Yak
ima " and a few minutes during which our
jovial stewardess, Peggy Shaw, busied herself
with a flight report, she picked up The So
ciety's map of the Northwestern United States
from the vacant seat at my side and began
to talk.
From her home in Zenith, Washington, she
had recently driven her station wagon through
Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascade Range to
Cle Elum, over the Wenatchee Mountains to
Blewett and north to lovely Lake Chelan.
"That's the road over the mountains from
Blewett," she said, pointing down to the range
at our right.
"And that must be the town of
Cle Elum. Yes, there's Cle Elum Lake and
Kachess Lake just beyond."
She looked back at the National Geo
graphic map in her lap.
"Why, the whole
trip is right here! Everything but little
Zenith."
I unfolded the map to the Puget Sound
inset and there, as much to my delight as to
Miss Shaw's, was "little Zenith."
Later, as
we were approaching the Seattle-Tacoma Air
port, she was able with the map's help to find
* See "Columbia Turns on the Power," by Maynard
Owen Williams, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE,
June, 1941.
t See "Washington, the Evergreen State," by Leo A.
Borah, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, February,
1933.
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